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> A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology.

Disclaimer: I worked on early software for the OLPC (had an original dev board) for a group that (long after I left) went on to win the Global Learning X-Prize [1].

I actually think the issue with the OLPC not achieving its goals is that they focused too much on the hardware and not what software was on the device and the learning outcomes the software delivered for children. The classic "here's some tech go figure out what to do with it" approach doesn't work. There was more interest in teaching to code and open software rather than basic numeracy and literacy. Content is king here.

That's why initiatives like those of the winners of the Global Learning X-Prize[1] have shown measurable impact on learning outcomes.

[1] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning

Completely agree!

We started playpower.org to build 8bit learning software for existing $10 tv-connected computers because it seemed like the OLPC didn't get that the market would happily make dirt cheap hardware, but wouldn't produce the software. At the time, we thought an open-source approach could work for content production, but gradually shifted into a for-profit funding mechanism. We still contribute to open source education (such as one of the global xprize finalists) but see our best work in helping commercial education companies produce better digital experiences. It is slow, incremental and often frustrating (working with textbook companies), but the scale of impact is enormous.

Bottom line: market forces can easily support cheap hardware but not support educationally effective software (since edu markets don't pay for efficacy)

I work in education technology as well and I definitely see what you're saying. There is always a focus on more and more tech... but content remains shitty across the board.

Youtubers are lightyears ahead of content providers in the education industry.

> I actually think the issue with the OLPC not achieving its goals is that they focused too much on the hardware and not what software was on the device and the learning outcomes the software delivered for children.

I worked with some of the early OLPC hardware as well, and I absolutely agree. The software which shipped with the OLPC was strangely designed and half-baked (at best!) -- the user interface was bizarre, many of the advertised features were unusable or barely usable, and there was an inexplicable lack of basic educational apps on the system. Most of the value of the OLPC in an educational environment probably came from its web browser and word processor, which were simply wrappers around Firefox and OpenOffice.

> The classic "here's some tech go figure out what to do with it" approach doesn't work.

Actually I think this does work, many us on this forum learned this way. It's just a shitty general purpose approach to intentional education. I think this would have been fine had they been able to sustain the project and someone else could have tackled the problem a different way. It seems like there was nobody with the right vision to attract money.

It also just was not clear what problem it was solving.

I disagree. Access to understandable technology is more important than content. These are not mere content delivery devices. Unfortunately, decision makers are poorly informed, and people are lazy, and prefer something already polished over a box of pointy tools.

Seems like there was a perennial disagreement (which is continuing today) about the degree to which OLPC was meant to help teach computing, or a curriculum, or just give students and teachers some tools to do parts of what they were doing anyway in a higher-tech way.

Edit: I particularly appreciate bryanwb's comments on autodidacticism at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21047351, which point at a fourth possibility: the idea that just having access to computers is good for kids.

Yes, this is true. I don't mean to say better software wouldn't have helped--I think OLPC was killed by a combination of factors. (Not least the early trajectory of its hype cycle.) But better software alone ... I don't think it would have materially changed the outcome in any way.

> That's why initiatives like those of the winners of the Global Learning X-Prize[1] have shown measurable impact on learning outcomes.

[1] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning

Sorry, but I have to challenge your authority. You're saying "measurable impact on learning outcomes" and then linking to same site which doesn't give any evidence of this. As far as I can tell, these prizes are being awarded by people who are all in the same social circles and even their peer reviewed papers don't seem to carry serious outcome analysis. The whole Nicholas Negroponte-Epstein-Ito scandal just shows these people are not interested in the outcome. Again, as he self-described himself "a rich white guy", Negroponte didn't suddenly wake up and care about the welfare and education of children in the third world, nope, not believable, as shown by his subsequent actions.

Negroponte's OLPC wasn't his first debacle either. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/71fe/5e987a89dfb7a6e7dbb3dd...

Negroponte and his gang of destroyers went from developing country to developing country intent on destroying simple proven-to-work schemes and replacing them with his costly OLPC. He knew that local NGOs desperate requests for funding would be bypassed in favor of his large contracts which could be utilized by bureaucrats to hide corruption.

I'm sorry that you wasted your time working on the software. I was tasked to work with the XO-1 and it was an utter waste of our time. We'd have been far better off if those funds had been spent on providing vaccinations, and lunches at school which have been proven to have a vastly better long term outcomes than a underpowered unconnectable amd-geode board with a wonky unusable pixelqi LCD.

Honestly, when I first heard of OLPC, I was so excited by all the claims. I remember they sent us screenshots of MIT engineers designing a pulley type charger and they told us the OLPC would run for hours from a few minutes of pulling. It was all fake and total marketing BS. Honestly, after the OLPC, my respect level for MIT Media Lab went down the drain. I realized these people aren't really significantly different than a reasonably educated grad student in a developing country. They just use their accents and mannerisms and social circles to get themselves perceived as being capable of delivering something superior, when in reality they delivered a barely passable netbook. The whole Joi Ito-Epstein pedo scandal has further reinforced my opinion. Developing countries would be better off not buying into the whole MIT aura as it does not seem deserved. It is sad that MIT continues slurping funds from developing countries to do jobs-for-the-boys club type projects. I had thought better of such an institution but I was completely wrong.

I wouldn't go as far as saying that it was a lost for the future of children, but I'm all in for saying that it made no difference.

I have 3 daughters between 25 and 18. The 3 of them received a netbook from the plan.

My father was a teacher both at secondary schools and at a university at the same time that the program developed, and he was a serious and dedicated proponent for the use of the netbooks on class; so, I kind of have a first hand experience on 2 sides of the dice ;)

From the side of my kids, it was just a way to be able to connect to the internet 24/7, with absolutely no effect on their academic performance (I'd dare saying it had a negative effect; not trying to diminish my responsibility, but it was rather difficult as a single father to policy 3 young girls while at the same time the example set on the contrary by their friends was rather strong: Most father would just let the kids use the computer all day, as that meant not having to care for them).

My father, on the other side, was an island in a sea of apathy from the people that were supposed to drive the change.

I think the biggest issues with the "Plan Conectar" were mainly four:

- The government on average thought was that it was enough just to drop the computers in the kids' lap. - There was a big disconnect between the main drivers of the program and the "lower ranks" of the educative establishment. - A HUGE percentage of the educative workforce was computer illiterate, and both passively and actively rejected the program. - When the program was crafted, it was not visible defined (Nor there was anybody / anything actively defining it nor enforcing it) who's responsibility was to implement the program from the top to bottom, so basically everybody's attitude was "Not my responsibility".

I'm friends with the person that was responsible for the program from the whole of my province, and I know for a fact - I even once applied for a position with them - how much of an effort they were doing for the program, and how excellent they were at doing that. I'm also aware of how much of a fight they were presented against, and how it felt like a lost cause from them start.

> - The government on average thought was that it was enough just to drop the computers in the kids' lap.

An relevant quote on technology and education [1]:

> You might have said "What is the role of computers and bicycles in education?" Then I would have said, "Why the bicycles?" and you "Why the computer?"

Efforts like OLPC seem to start from wrong place: presupposing that access to technology will be good for education and then figuring out how to solve that, rather than looking at what educational issues actually exist and determining the problem from there.

[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html

I really like that quote, not sure why you left the juicy part out ;)

Yeah, I think basically the problem stems from thinking technology is an end instead of a medium; and even for those that do see it as a medium, they are not quite clear how it fits the education environment.

In the end, we should first try to focus on fixing education - that, from my point of view, is a process that is utterly broken everywhere - before shoving in there something like technology.

Ey thanks for sharing your experience. I appreciate your perspective as a father.

My experience is from the teachers training side: as part of the University of Buenos Aires, I taught programming classes to high school teachers.

I think that having a computer is much better than not having it. It makes no difference for kids with access to computers, but there are kids that doesn’t have that. For those kids it may do a difference.

My main complain of the “Plan Conectar Igualdad” is about the cost of incompetence. As you mention there is a lot of capable people that wants better education, but when resources are not very well aligned and plans like this are at the risk to die in each economic down turn, I wished a much better approach rather that giving the netbooks and wait for a miracle.

> but there are kids that doesn’t have that

Yes, totally agree here. Obviously was far from my experience (In my house there've been for years now more computers than people, and that's not even counting cellphones). But I couldn't agree more with what you are saying: For an incredible lot of kids was not only the first contact with a computer; it was also completelly unrestricted.

Regarding incompetence, I think there was some sort of desconnection from reality from a lot of people in key places: I think way too many people thought that just dropping the netbooks would be enough (Like in Ethipia) without even considering cultural and social constraints.

It still baffles me that it is heralded as a success by a lot of people from the previous government; yet, I think that the move by the current government to scrap it completely - instead on making the effort of fixing the problems - was utterly stupid. There was a lot of energy, effort and knowledge by a lot of incredible hard working and knowledgeable people put into making them work.

Also, I never gave them much of a cursory look, but I think the machines were _really_ configured to be a powerful assistant to education: It's demise in the end was mostly due to - failed - politics... Just like with socialism ;)

"Conectar" was my introduction to computers. When I was a teenager I felt that some people were really making an effort to bring new opportunities but many didn't appreciate it, like teachers who couldn't figure out configuration stuff and just dismissed the effort by the government and personnel who worked in the program because they thought We (many poor children in the "Interior") wouldn't have any kind of curiosity about them. Don't misunderstand me but I used to heard things like "No entiendo para que lanzaron este programa si estos chicos nunca van a ser programadores o van a trabajar de éso"... Of course I can talk about it, It just wasn't about throwing computers to us and expect us to hack our way to success. I think that by mid 2020's Argentina will have much more literate computer users and many people with more expertise in a variety of things, and with that new context We will do better by recycling good ideas and reviewing mistakes from the past.

Exactly. very well put.

> We (many poor children in the "Interior") wouldn't have any kind of curiosity about them.

This.They were actually disguising their own ignorance behind these kind of arguments. That, as well, is totally contrary to the idea of educating.

"...yet, I think that the move by the current government to scrap it completely - instead on making the effort of fixing the problems - was utterly stupid..."

Yes, they should have tried to improve the program. But they didn't, the current government it just marketing. They really disappointed people.

I think that the project failed because it ignored the political aspects of the education system. The $100 laptop was a distraction. A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology.

I suspect 1/100 or 1/500 or some similar number of people will be extraordinary autodidacts and, if you give them sufficient baseline education and an Internet-connected computer, they will get extraordinary results. I've worked on numerous 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) proposals that were supposed to get computers and the Internet in US schools from 2000 onwards. That effort has largely succeeded and not been a panacea.

Today I still ban laptops in class: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract... because they seem to detract from learning, on the net.

I'm an "autodidact" programmer so I feel like I should discount myself as an outlier in this discussion, but I'm amazed to see my kids just spending time on their computers at age 4-5. They are learning really complex problem solving in Minecraft, learning to sound out words when searching the inventory for items, and learning a little geometry when trying to predict the right coordinates to teleport to. They learn fluent English with an advanced vocabulary automatically too. I love to watch it and it reminds me of how I engaged with computers as a kid too.

They learn all this stuff independently on YouTube tutorials. I just join in their games and play along and ask for help when I get stuck. Or help them with sysadmin tasks like installing the "mods" they want to try.

So I feel like my kids are living the dream and engaging with computers in a positive way, regardless of whether it improves their grades in school, and to me the purpose of OLPC was to spread this self-directed play-learning opportunity much more widely.

Isn't everybody a bit of an autodidact in the age of YouTube, podcasts, blogs, and forums?

At the time of the program in many areas of Argentina it was rather internet was not really widespread enough. And when the kids would go in the internet would be either to play Counter-Strike or log into Facebook, that was taking over the world at the time.

> if you give them sufficient baseline education

That didn't happen. I think even 1/500 is too optimist.

Anecdotally, there were some security measures implemented in the netbooks in Argentina that would require periodic re-enabling (So as to prevent kids for quitting school?) and the only "smart" thing I saw coming out of the netbooks was kids finding out how to circumvent those measures (That in this age and time means just googling it)

> The pressure from Intel/Microsoft to no adopt it was incredible.

At that point in time, the OLPC was perceived as an existential threat to Microsoft and, to a lesser degree, to Intel. Intel because it had nothing that could be used in them (which was solved to some extent by netbooks and Atom processors). For Microsoft, it meant a whole generation of kids could grow up having never used Office or Windows, something that Microsoft would not be able to counter unless OLPC failed.

Brazil was pretty much the same. They made an incredible effort to push Atom-based computers running Windows that had none of the more interesting aspects of the OLPC - not the sunlight-friendly screen, the mesh network, the software for group activities, the openness to tinkering...

I don't think the OLPC team realized its mere announcement would be a declaration of war. They'd need Intel's buy-in (at least to cut Microsoft lose) and they'd need to quickly mass-market the tech through someone like V-Tech in developed countries to get funded through hardware licensing and financial commitment to get software and content developed.

Then they could properly scale up to government level and demonstrate the Microsoft argument that the kids wouldn't be prepared to join the workforce (and enjoy the Microsoft lock-in) was void.

Now, imagine the colossal power it would be to be able to help shape the content kids all over the world would use to learn. I would expect the US government to get interested in that, but it didn't.

I think there was a missed step between the original concept and the step to productionization. Recent scandal aside, MIT's Media Lab has been a pivotal force in technology, but sometimes the world at large isn't ready for pivots. In this case, fighting both Microsoft and Intel (with the full benefit of hindsight) was unfortunately and ultimately foolish.

My outsider perspective is parts of the Media Lab had an ivory-tower, idealized view that Thinkpads running Linux are the proper way to compute (no judgement, I still believe that), thus the OLPC should resemble that, but childlike. One route to productionization would have been to move the platform to existing expensive Windows(/Intel) laptops after the first production run proving that a $100 BOM was quite possible. Moving to Windows laptops would have been a very large compromise to the original project's high-minded, ambitions goals, but one that would have preserved the project. The Windows kernel and Explorer isn't open but that wouldn't have prevented porting the Sugar interface to Windows and kept the main UI software goals of the project open source and editable/"compilable" directly on the laptop.

When we make plans, we often forget about the possible failure scenarios - What if we fail at making the hardware? What if someone else makes it better? What if the software can't be built? What if governments don't buy it?

It feels like they didn't have enough Plan B's for when their Plan A's failed.

:-(

Exactly the same for Peru where I live.

> A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology. But if you learn a little bit about the history of education in each country, you’ll see that education is closely related with politics ... if you want to change the education system including how teachers teach... technology alone is not enough.

Careful now, Jason Palmer was anathematized by the Valley elite for saying exactly that: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/style/oh-behave.html

every good will project ignore politics, marketing, and reality and fails miserably

tough

It is hard enough to get good projects going, especially something involving hardware. They have to think about funding, manufacturing, shipment, spreading the word out ... In addition to these, if they also have to think about politics - especially against those with insane resources like Intel or Microsoft, it is almost an impossible fight.

It says a lot about our society as a whole that good projects face such miserable odds